In honor of World Refugee Day, June 20, the NCTSN launched its newest product. The Refugee Services Toolkit is a web-based tool designed to help service system providers understand the experience of refugee children and families, identify the needs associated with their mental health, and ensure that they are connected with the most appropriate available interventions. The mental health and general well-being of refugee children and families can be impacted by multiple factors including their experience of trauma, resettlement, acculturation, and social isolation. Providers will learn about each of the different core stressors refugee families can experience, have the opportunity to assess a client’s risk level in each of these areas, and receive resources and intervention ideas on how to proceed. Assessment summaries for individual clients can be printed and placed in the client’s file and used for reference at a later time. National level resources and contact information for refugee technical assistance centers are provided, along with case examples and provider tips.

Presenters will address the influence of culture on mental health providers coping with secondary traumatic stress (STS) and the choices that clinicians make to seek, or not seek, support. They also will explore how cultural background—including immigration history—informs clinicians’ work with children and families who have experienced trauma; illustrate the relationship between culture and STS through a personal case example; and introduce the concept of vicarious resiliency.

Presenters, who are partnering to introduce universal trauma screening to the state of Connecticut, will explore issues of implementation and sustainability in an already over-burdened child welfare system, how to meaningfully and successfully integrate and embed this practice, and ways to address the affects of this practice on case workers.

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RESOURCES AVAILABLE
The NCTSN has various resources to help support those experiencing the devastating wildfires burning across several states.Some of these resources include Parent Guidelines for Helping Children Impacted by Wildfires or Wildfires: Tips for Parents on Media Coverage (resources available in both English and Spanish)

Network Colleagues Ann Masten and Angela Narayan are the authors of Child Development in the Context of Disaster, War, and Terrorism: Pathways of Risk and Resilience published in this year’s Annual Review of Psychology (Volume 63, pages 227-257). Authors highlight progress over the past decade in research on the effects of mass trauma experiences on children and youth, focusing on natural disasters, war, and terrorism. They review conceptual advances in terms of prevailing risk and resilience frameworks that guide basic and translational research. Authors evaluate recent evidence on common components of these models, including dose effects, mediators and moderators, and the individual or contextual differences that predict risk or resilience. Also, they discuss new research horizons with profound implications for health and well-being, particularly in relation to plausible models for biological embedding of extreme stress. Authors noted strong consistencies in this literature, suggesting guidelines for disaster preparedness and response. At the same time, they noted the “stunning lack of evidence on intervention” for child and youth victims. Practical and theory-informative research on strategies to protect children and youth victims and promote their resilience is a global priority.

Network Members Lisa Amaya-Jackson, Jan Markiewicz, and John Fairbank are among the authors of Development and Application of the NCCTS Learning Collaborative Model for Implementation of Evidence-Based Child Trauma Treatment, a chapter in Dissemination and Implementation of Evidence-Based Psychological Interventions published by the Oxford Press. In this chapter, the authors describe the NCCTS Learning Collaborative Model, an approach to implementing evidence-based psychotherapeutic interventions intended to support the delivery and sustained use of effective child trauma treatments in community practice settings.

The Human Rights Campaign recently released Growing Up LGBT in America, a study of 10,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) young people and straight youth ages 13-17. A major finding of the study was that LGBT youth are twice as likely as their peers to report they have been physically assaulted, kicked, or shoved at school. More than one-half of LGBT youth (54 percent) say they have been verbally harassed and called names involving anti-gay slurs.

Network Members Mandy Habib and Victor Labruna are the authors of Clinical Considerations in Assessing Trauma and PTSD in Adolescents published in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma (Volume 4, Issue 3). Authors outline some of the issues complicating an accurate assessment of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder, such as varying definitions of trauma, chronicity or multiplicity of exposure, and developmental factors unique to adolescents. Authors review considerations in conducting thorough assessments, focusing on the factors underlying the unintentional minimization and/or active concealment of traumatic events and trauma symptoms. They offer suggestions to enhance assessment accuracy and discuss treatment implications.

Presenters will discuss overcoming barriers including differing amounts of clinical experience and training by those administering trauma screening, the challenges of changing an already embedded practice, and the secondary traumatic stress issues that arise when a practitioner begins to ask about trauma.